Gluck by Diana Souhami (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📗

in Sussex and another in Kensington at 41 Egerton Square. They wintered on the ski slopes, made frequent trips to the United States and travelled the world. In the early years of their relationship, when parted, the two women wrote to each other two or three times a day, sent telegrams and telephoned and longed for separation to end.

Friday night

It’s a cruel thing to say but it makes me feel less lopsided to know you are suffering equally, because I thought it would not be so bad for you with so many ‘goings on’ going on and with me enforcedly alone all days – though I know it would not make any difference to me how much I was surrounded and now I see you are the same.

Alone a lot in her studio, Gluck created the fantasy, common to lovers but insubstantial as a bubble, of divine synchrony:

I have no doubts now that I receive by that curious bond between us waves from you, sad or happy and I like to feel this. Do you remember us leaning against that field fence at Plumpton and looking at the stars and how bright Orion was and how you said you like him so much? Well these last nights every time I came out of the Studio the first thing I saw in the sky was Orion blazing away – the stars have been very bright and he is in the Southern sky at the moment and from there and my bedroom the most prominent. And I see again your darling face quite clear and beautiful in the moonlight. One day I am going to do a picture of that star because it was so lovely. It was so calm and big and we were so close – and poor old Rex [one of Nesta’s dogs], and you being so heartbreaking about him and me having got cross. Aren’t I awful! Ha! Goodnight my angel. I adore you – and kiss your hands, your face and your loved body all over – and thus you sniggle up and go to sleep. That’s me to you tonight. You will probably read this on a bright sunny morning and that’s what time and space can do to thought. Let’s forget it.

This Love was Truth in a universal sense. It was elemental, it merged with the stars in the southern sky, it was beyond harm or accurate expression, it was, like her painting, a God-given gift and it was, with her painting, her world. There were no boundaries, no borders. ‘It is because we fused and in every way, that it is suffering as well.’ The past was over and the present and future could not divide them. It would escape ‘The Rubbish Heap of Time’, the world’s constraints. It was the original thing.

I think we are like a perfect apple cut in half – the most lovely and significant of fruits and I am sure for that reason chosen as of the Tree of Knowledge.

Gluck, of course, was Adam, and suffering, during a three-week separation, from the hole in his rib cage:

It’s shocking how he misses his rib when Eve is not by his side, his heart nearly pops out through the gap that’s been left. Today it’s a fortnight – they do say it’s the first twenty years that are the worst!

Nor was it a love that had a moral reference in society’s terms, the Truth being beyond morality – ‘the greatest bond of all – the most precious and the most difficult in the world of human relationships and I think you will agree our proudest possession’. The Truth, as Gluck felt it, was that Nesta was her inspiration and her wife: ‘Love, you are such an inspiration to me, and that you should be my darling wife too is all any man can expect out of life, don’t you agree?’9 The fact that Nesta already had a husband in the ordinary sense of the word and that the world did not define Gluck as a man, were not truths with the same weight as truths of the heart. And if the heart was anarchic, dangerous or destructive, so be it. Writing of Byron and his relationship with his half-sister, Augusta, both women remained unshocked:

Re Incest. No I can’t be shocked at it either. What a pity we can’t add all this to ‘YouWe’. Perhaps we do. It seems to me sometimes as if we have every relationship rolled into one – Just a teeny weeny bit of a shadow of a shadow of incest too, don’t you think? Ha! As for you ‘bestraddling’, glorious word, all worlds, you do, we do. Again a bond. I don’t so much as you because my life has been less varied, but mentally near enough to share the detachment and twinkle. Adorable you. How I love you.… Oh my darling Love, my Heart, there never has been anything in the world before so lovely and warm and complete as Us.10

This was no callow, passing crush. Neither of the women was young. Gluck was forty one, Nesta forty three. Both had packed in a fair amount of living. But for Gluck at least the past was over now. Nesta alone understood her, knew her thoughts and feelings and who she really was. ‘We feel and think together whatever the distance – only I wish it wasn’t being proved so often because of being parted so much.’ At times the sense of fusion and of presence in absence had a hallucinatory quality and life became a waking dream:

At 5.30 a.m. I woke up and you were asleep, your head on the pillow next to mine and I looked at you with my eyes open and I was awake and it was so intense that I got a pain across my forehead – and of course it could not last more than a minute like that. But it comforted me. You were so very much there.… I know